The WhatsApp vulnerability that can consume your entire data plan in minutes

It seems like a new bug is affecting the platform of WhatsApp, the most famous instant messaging service in the world. This time, the problem occurs when archiving conversations, when not only the most recent conversations are recorded, but also the oldest conversations and, therefore, already present in the backup.

One of the most interesting options WhatsApp offers precisely the ability to make a backup of the discussions, photos and videos shared in the application. Naturally, this operation involves a significant data traffic consumption, which however depends on the use that each user makes of the application.

Therefore, this new problem may involve a remarkable occupation of memory space, as well as a large volume of data traffic during loading. If the operation is carried out under the cover of a Wi-Fi network, the only problem is the time required to complete the data download, while if the action is performed with the data connection it could even consume all available traffic.

The problem has been reported by some users. When storing their WhatsApp conversations in Google Drive, they found that instead of the usual 60MB, the data download exceeded 5GB. The problem seems to be due to a programming error, present in the current version of WhatsApp, for Android and iOS.

In addition, some users also reported that often, when trying to perform the backup, the operation was interrupted without reason. When it is re-enabled, the download starts from scratch and the amount of data ends up duplicating itself, with space and traffic problems.

Up to now, the problem that this situation causes is not clear and WhatsApp has not provided any official indication. The advice, clearly, is to make the backup of conversations completely manually and, therefore, perform it only under a Wi-Fi network so as not to experience sudden drops in available data traffic.